Once, long ago, some humans had attempted to build an island of their own, so they wouldn’t have to live all the time under the eyes of Gillie neighbours. They had figured out how it was done and had begun weaving the fibres, but before they got very far the island was attacked by huge sea creatures and destroyed. Dozens of lives were lost. Everyone assumed the monsters had been sent by the Gillies, who obviously hadn’t liked the idea of humans setting up a little independent domain of their own. No one had ever tried it again.
Grayvard, Lawler thought. Well, well, well.
One island is as good as another, he told himself. He’d manage to adapt, somehow, wherever they landed. But would they be really welcome on Grayvard? Would they even be able to find it, somewhere out there between Home Sea and the Red Sea? What the hell. Let Delagard worry about it. Why should he care? It was all out of his hands.
Gharkid’s voice, thin and husky and piping, came to Lawler as he was walking slowly back up to his vaargh.
“Doctor? Doctor-sir?”
He was heavily laden, staggering under the weight of two immense dripping baskets stuffed with algae that he carried in a shoulder-harness. Lawler halted to wait for him. Gharkid came lurching toward him and let the baskets slide from his shoulders practically at Lawler’s feet.
Gharkid was a small wiry man, so much shorter than Lawler that he had to crane his head far back in order to look at him straight on. He smiled, showing brilliant white teeth against the dusky backdrop of his face. There was something earnest and very appealing about him. But the childlike simplicity that the man affected, that cheerful peasant innocence, could be a little cloying sometimes.
“What’s all this?” Lawler asked, looking down at the tangle of weeds spilling out of the baskets, green ones and red ones and yellow ones streaked with gaudy purple veins.
“For you, doctor-sir. Medicines. For when we leave, to take with us.”
Gharkid grinned. He seemed very pleased with himself.
Lawler, kneeling, poked through the sopping mess. He was able to recognize some of the seaweeds. This bluish one was the painkiller, and this with the dark strap-shaped lateral leaves yielded the better of the two antiseptics, and this one—yes, this one was numbweed. Unquestionably numbweed. Good old Gharkid. Lawler looked up and as his gaze met Gharkid’s there was for just a moment a flash of something not all that naive and childlike in Gharkid’s dark eyes.
“To take with us on the ship,” Gharkid said, as though Lawler hadn’t comprehended before. “These are the good ones, for the drugs. I thought you’d want them, some extras.”
“You’ve done very well,” Lawler said. “Here. Let’s carry this stuff up to my vaargh.”
It was a rich haul. The man had gathered some of everything that had any medicinal use. Lawler had been putting it off and putting it off and at last Gharkid had simply gone out into the bay and loaded up on the whole pharmacopoeia. Well done indeed, Lawler thought. Especially the numbweed. There’d be just enough time to process all this before they sailed, get it all refined down into powders and salves and ointments and tinctures. And then the ship would be nicely stocked with medicines for the long pull to Grayvard. He knew his algae, Gharkid did. Once again Lawler wondered if Gharkid was really as much of a simpleton as he seemed, or if that was merely some sort of defensive pose. Gharkid often seemed like a blank soul, a tabula rasa on which anyone was free to write anything at all. There had to be more to him than that, somewhere inside. But where?
The final days before sailing were bad ones. Everyone admitted the necessity to go, but not everybody had believed it would really happen, and now reality was closing in with terrible force. Lawler saw old women making piles of their possessions outside their vaarghs, staring blankly at them, rearranging them, carrying things inside and bringing other things out. Some of the women and a few of the men cried all the time, some of them quietly, some not so quietly. The sounds of hysterical sobbing could be heard all through the night. Lawler treated the worst cases with numbweed tincture. “Easy, there,” he kept saying. “Easy, easy.” Thorn Lyonides was drunk three days straight, roaring and singing, and then he started a fight with Bamber Cadrell, saying that nobody was going to make him get on board one of those ships. Delagard came by with Gospo Struvin and said, “What the fuck is this,” and Lyonides jumped at him, snarling and screeching like a lunatic. Delagard hit him in the face, and Struvin caught him around the throat and throttled him until he calmed down. “Put him on his ship,” Delagard said to Cadrell. “Make sure he stays there until we sail.”
On the next-to-last day, and the last day also, parties of Gillies came right down to the border between their territory and the human settlement and stood there watching in their inscrutable way, as if making sure the humans were making ready to clear out. Everyone on Sorve knew now that there would be no reprieve, no revocation of the order of expulsion. The last doubters, the last deniers, had had to cave in under the pressure of those fishy, staring, implacable eyes. Sorve was lost to them forever. Grayvard would be their new home. That much was settled.
Just before the end, hours from departure, Lawler climbed the island to its rearmost point, on the side opposite the bay, where the high bulwark faced the ocean. It was noon, and the water was ablaze with reflected light.
From his vantage point on the bulwark Lawler looked out across the open sea and imagined himself sailing on it, far from any shore. He wanted to find out if he still feared it, that endless world of water on which he would embark not very long from now.
No. No. All the fear seemed to have gone from him that drunken night at Delagard’s place. It hadn’t returned. Lawler stared into the distance and saw nothing but ocean, and that was all right. There wasn’t anything to fear. He would be exchanging the island for a ship, which was nothing more than a miniature island, really. What was the worst-case possibility, then? That his ship would sink in a storm, he supposed, or be smashed by the Wave, and he’d die. All right: he had to die sooner or later. That wasn’t news. But ships weren’t lost at sea all that often. The odds were that they would reach Grayvard safely. He would go ashore once again and begin a new life.
What Lawler still felt, rather than fear of the voyage that lay ahead, was the occasional sharp stab of grief for all he would be leaving behind. The longing arose quickly and just as quickly went, unsatisfied.
But now, strangely, the things he was leaving behind began to leave him. As Lawler stood with his back to the settlement, staring into the great dark expanse of the water, they all seemed to depart on the breeze that was blowing past him out to sea: his awesome father, his gentle elusive mother, his almost forgotten brothers. His whole childhood, his coming of age, his brief marriage, his years as the island doctor, as the Dr Lawler of his generation. Everything going away, suddenly. Everything. He felt weirdly light, as if he could simply mount the breeze and float through the air to Grayvard. All the shackles seemed to have broken. Everything that held him here had fallen from him in a moment. Everything.
TWO
To the Empty Sea
1
The first four days of the voyage had been placid, almost suspiciously so. “Real strange is what it is,” said Gabe Kinverson, and solemnly shook his head. “You’d expect some troubles by now, this far out in the middle of nowhere,” he said, looking out over the slow, calm blue-grey swells. The wind was steady. The sails were full. The ships stayed close together, moving serenely across a glassy sea on their route toward the northwest, toward Grayvard. A new home; a new life; for the seventy-eight voyagers, the castaways, the exiles, it was like a second birth. But should any birth, a first one or a second, be as easy as this? And how much longer would it be this easy?